There’s a school of marketing research that I find both deeply reassuring and mildly terrifying in equal measure.
The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at the University of South Australia has spent decades studying how brands actually grow. Not how we think they grow, or how we’d like them to grow, but how they demonstrably, measurably grow in the real world.
Their findings, popularised by Professor Byron Sharp in his book ‘How Brands Grow’, upend a lot of received wisdom about marketing. But one finding in particular is so consistent, so replicable, so stubbornly evident across category after category, that it’s hard to argue with:
Mental availability is everything.
What does that mean in plain English? When a customer is about to make a purchase decision, standing in the supermarket aisle, searching Google, or asking a friend for a recommendation, the brand that wins is almost always the one that comes to mind first. Not the one with the best product. Not the cheapest. The one that’s most present in the customer’s memory.
And what determines mental availability? Distinctive brand assets. The things that make a brand immediately, unmistakably recognisable; its visual identity, its name, its colours, its character, the feeling it creates.
Sharp’s research suggests that brands with genuinely distinctive assets are significantly more likely to be recalled at the moment of purchase. Other studies put the number at around 80% more likely to be remembered when a brand is perceived as different from its competitors.
Eighty percent.
That’s not a marginal gain. That’s the difference between being chosen and being invisible.
Here’s the uncomfortable upshot of all this research: most small businesses are investing in everything except the thing that drives growth. They’re focused on price, on product, on service (all of which matter of course) while the brand, the single biggest driver of mental availability, gets neglected.
Not because they don’t care. Because they don’t know how. Because nobody has told them, in plain English, that the way their business looks and feels to the world is one of the most commercially important decisions they'll ever make.
Byron Sharp didn’t invent this idea. David Ogilvy was saying something similar in the 1960s. Distinctive brands have always outperformed generic ones. The Ehrenberg-Bass research just gave us the numbers to prove it.
If that wasn’t enough to fire you up, top UK branding agency JKR undertook a study in 2023 with Ipsos, one of the world's leading market research companies titled ‘Be Distinct Everywhere’. They looked at 5 key brand assets across 26,000 respondents, and came to the conclusion that only 15% were truly distinctive. 65% of those they tested were said to have weak brand associations. That’s pretty shocking whichever way you look at it!
The hedgehog, it turns out, had it right all along.
Five thousand spines. Nothing else like it. Impossible to confuse with anything else.
That’s not an accident of evolution. That’s a survival mechanism.
Distinct beats invisible. The science says so. The numbers back it up. And after thirty years of watching what happens when businesses commit to a genuinely distinctive brand, and what happens when they don’t, I can tell you from experience: it’s true.
Time to unfurl.
